The Glories of Minnesota Hockey Hair, from the Mullet to the “Portobella”

For nearly a decade, one man has chronicled one of the most endearing rituals in American sports.

In 2013, BuzzFeed published a list of “38 Things Minnesotans Are Too Nice to Brag About.” No. 1 was Bob Dylan. No. 2 was “the hockey haircut,” by which the author meant, basically, the mullet, although the page embedded a video of boys at the annual state high-school tournament in which the narrator identified additional styles, such as “the cotton candy,” “the tsunami,” and the “portobella” (a mushroom cut). The main ingredient in hockey hair is volume. Games at the Minnesota state tournament, which rivals Texas football and Indiana hoops in terms of regional fervor, begin with player introductions that have evolved into one of the most endearing rituals in American sports. The ice between the goal lines and the blue lines becomes an imaginary catwalk. Helmets off. Each kid awaits the calling of his name, at the twenty-thousand-seat Xcel Energy Center, in St. Paul, and then begins skating toward the cameras of Channel 45, which now streams online to a global audience—the Land O’Lakes diaspora, scattered across as many as thirty-seven countries and five continents. Hockey is a rough sport, played in bulky, anonymizing equipment, and these closeups provide a rare opportunity to swan. Some boys run hands through their manes, which may or may not have been brightened with peroxide. Some give a little head-shake, setting follicles in motion. Others turn side to side, offering profile views: muttonchops, stripes. Most say, “Hi, mom.”

The man responsible for elevating the “sideshow,” as he calls it, to viral prominence, and the creator of the video mentioned above, is a forty-four-year-old advertising executive from the Minneapolis suburb of White Bear Lake named John King. In 2005, while writing bits for a short-lived sports variety program called “The Show to Be Named Later,” which aired in the Twin Cities after “Saturday Night Live,” he conceived the idea of ranking the state’s teen heroes not by goals and assists but by “salad” and “flow,” in hockey-hair parlance. The show’s producers edited the player intros from the state tournament into a slo-mo Top Ten list. No one much noticed. But, several years later, King tried again, on his own, uploading to YouTube a video announcing his All Hockey Hair team: Top Ten, plus honorable mentions. The video was a homespun lark, about five minutes long, consisting largely of clips of the telecast that he’d pirated using his iPhone and footage of King’s hands wrapping the handles of combs with hockey tape. Those were the trophies. He also made arrangements with a local salon called Hair Matters—“because when it comes to hockey, your hair does matter”—to offer free styling to any player who’d made the cut. (“Ask for Meghan.”) King e-mailed the link to the parents of his children’s youth-hockey teammates and went to see a movie. The next morning, when he checked his phone, the video’s view count was at ten thousand and climbing.

In the years since, King has put his adman’s penchant for wordplay to use, ratcheting up the inside jokes (“land of ten thousand locks”) and cataloguing new rink-rat hair varietals: the “railroad baron,” the “disinterested pompadour,” the “Charlie Sheen” (“party in the back and the front”), the “prowler poodle.” As his view counts rose, in some cases surpassing two million, King seemed to flatten the vowels in his accent, to ever-greater deadpan effect. Minnesota-born N.H.L. players began making cameos to cheer the kids on.

In 2016, ESPN’s Barry Melrose, who has maintained a mullet since his days coaching Wayne Gretzky (himself no stranger to a healthy head of lettuce) in Los Angeles, visited White Bear Lake and interviewed King for a segment on “E:60,” which brought King what he calls the “perfect amount” of fame, such that he occasionally caught people staring at him on airplanes, wondering why he looked familiar.

A couple of weeks ago, King tweeted, without further explanation, that this year’s All Hockey Hair team would be his last. I wrote him, and we arranged to meet for a drink in Manhattan—he’s now the president of the New York office of Fallon Worldwide, an agency headquartered in Minneapolis, and splits his time between White Bear Lake and the Upper West Side. King has what a connoisseur of the genre might call silky flow: dark brown, dusting the shoulders, with a center part and slightly flaring sideburns. He ordered a tequila-and-soda and gave several reasons for his early retirement.

“There are only so many jokes,” he said, for a start. And he didn’t want to wake up one day at fifty-five and realize that he’d become “the old man that grades the high-school boys’ hair.” His son, Bennett, is a senior at White Bear Lake Area High School, which qualified for the tournament this year for the first time since 2011, the beginning of King’s YouTube reign. (His daughter, Peyton, is in college, studying abroad.) “He actually has absolutely amazing hair,” King said of his son, who is not on the team, summoning him on FaceTime to prove it. Bennett stroked his hair, demonstrating its enviable thickness. (King suggested that the hair was worthy of “Top Ten” status, but I found it hard to judge without the context of shoulder pads and a freshly Zambonied sheet of ice.) On instinct, I found myself raking my own unimpressive mop, as if in a courtship ritual or a dominance display. Not long after, a hockey-playing friend of mine joined us and felt compelled to summon his own teen-age son on FaceTime for a tress inspection.

Was any of this serious? Part of the charm of King’s videos is that the line between sincerity and shtick can be hard to discern. (In his 2014 video, King unearthed archival VHS footage of what he called pre-“ironic” hockey hair: “They really had stripes because they wanted to have stripes,” he says.) “I really love the tournament,” King stressed. “I think it’s as good as it gets.” He showed us a video on his phone of the closing seconds of White Bear Lake’s qualifying victory. The players raced over to the student cheering section and started scaling the glass, in skates. Bennett was in the front row, “with the orange hat and the long hair,” King said, pointing. “I mean, just look at how happy he is. It’s pure.”

King grew up in Edina, a wealthy suburb whose residents are sometimes derided by other Minnesotans as “cake eaters,” an allusion to Marie Antoinette. (The bad guys in “The Mighty Ducks” are cake eaters.) He played football in high school, not hockey—an inferior caste in Minnesota, he explained, with a military ethos that discouraged individuality. Minnesota’s hockey players, by contrast, “are more like cowboys,” he said. “They’ve probably had someone telling them they’re awesome since they were six.” He still recalls idolizing Tommy Nevers, the first freshman to make the Edina varsity, in the late nineteen-eighties. “He had a straight-up mullet,” King said. “He dated a girl that was older than him. You would see him drive out of the school parking lot in a Jeep Wrangler, and you were just saying, ‘It’s good to be Tommy.’ ”

Nevers’s son Mason is a current Edina senior, as it happens, and was one of ten finalists for the state’s official Mr. Hockey award. His flow is relatively restrained, in keeping with a pattern I observed while watching the tournament last week: the favorites—Edina was a top seed—tended to be less flamboyant than the underdogs. King insisted that this wasn’t always the case. “For sure, there are old-school coaches that lose the state tournament and they say, ‘The boys were more worried about their hair than the game,’ ” he said. “But if you look, almost to a T, the teams that win it, it’s total shenanigans.” Still, there was something nice, I thought, in the idea of months of lettuce cultivation as an expression of hope, or an alternative glory, among the long shots. The girls’ teams also have their tournament at the Xcel Center, but, for most of their players, it seems, hair is something to be subdued rather than flaunted, in the interest of playing a stereotypically macho game. (In his 2014 video, King tried demonstrating the challenges in giving the girls their due, providing commentary over a montage of several player intros: “Sport wrap. Sport wrap. Braid! Sport wrap.”) Last year, though, Carly Beniek, a junior for the girls team at the private Breck School, approached the blue line with her hair pulled back, then yanked an elastic band off and snapped her head forward, sending a blond wave crashing over her eyes. “Rapuckzel, Rapuckzel,” King cheered. He awarded her first prize.

A prominent shampoo brand reached out to King a couple of years ago with an idea for a tie-in ad campaign. “I was, like, ‘Hell no,’ ” he said. “That’s what I do every day. This is supposed to be fun, and kind of the Wild West.” (His ability to monetize the videos directly was always constrained by the fact that he didn’t own the copyright to most of the footage he compiled.) For his “Grand Flownale,” as he called it, he set up a GoFundMe page for the Hendrickson Foundation, a charity associated with sled hockey for people with disabilities. The foundation’s slogan is “hockey changes lives.” (King’s amended version: “hockey hair changes lives.”) He posted the video just before midnight on Saturday, a couple of hours after Edina scored in overtime to beat Eden Prairie and claim its thirteenth championship, in front of a sold-out crowd. As of this writing, the video has been viewed more than half a million times.

More than once during our conversation, King brought up the especially brutal winter they’d been enduring back home. “We had more snow in February than the state has ever had in the history of time,” he said. “My garage froze shut, so my wife couldn’t get her car out. So I had to go get a flamethrower and chip away at the ice. Then I had to shovel a perimeter around my home, like a moat. And then I had to rake the roof. So, I mean, if we don’t have something special, when we live like this . . . ” The special thing, he meant, was hockey, and the peculiar pageantry that attaches to it. “I like how alien it is,” he said. “It makes me proud to be a Minnesotan.”